April 2, 2023: Daniel Kahn and Jake Shulman-Ment

Workshop: Yiddish Song Smuggling, with Daniel Kahn

1 PM at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

As spots are limited, participants much register in advance. Buy your tickets for the workshop and the jam at this link.

This workshop, taught by Detroit-born, Hamburg-based troubadour and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Kahn, will focus on polyglot performance, traditional subversion, tradaptation (translation + adaptation), multi-musical mixology, and other modes of border-crossing in modern Yiddish song work. Bring your voices, your languages, your masks, and your minds.

Workshop and Klezmer Jam Session, with Jake Shulman-Ment

3 PM at the Museum of Jewish Montreal

Participants may register in advance or drop in. Buy your tickets for the workshop and the jam at this link.

Join KlezKanada and the Jewish Museum of Montreal for a klezmer music jam, led by New Yorker master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment! Aimed at intermediate to advanced musicians but open to all, this jam session is a space where Montrealers can come together to play klezmer music, learn repertoire, and build a community. The jam session will start with a short repertoire workshop, where Jake will teach a tune or two (by ear) to get the jam started.

Masks are strongly encouraged. Help us to keep our community safe! KlezKanada will have n95 masks available at the door for those who need them.

Daniel Kahn and Jack Shulman-Ment: The Building & Other Songs

8PM at Casa del Popolo (Doors at 7:30)

Tickets are now available online (click here) and will also be available at the door. As capacity is limited, we recommend purchasing your ticket in advance.

Detroit-born, Hamburg-based troubadour and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Kahn and New Yorker master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment have been playing and traveling together for nearly twenty years. After so many years playing together in many bands and projects (including The Painted Bird and Brothers Nazaroff), they have finally joined up to record an analog duo record: The Building & Other Songs. It is, as Kahn says, "the most personal and intimate selection of songs I've ever recorded. And with Jake, it was like recording it with a brother." The interpretations range from radical treatments of modern Yiddish songs such as Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman's title track "Der Binyen / The Building," to new Yiddish translations of some of Kahn's lyrical heroes: Cohen, Brecht, Springsteen, Guthrie, and Waits. Yiddish serves here as a kind of broken mirror, reflecting both despair and repair, exile and ecstasy, loss of trust and wanderlust. The title track is the key to it all: "Imagine your building… how it suddenly burns and falls…a tower of steel on foundations of straw… Why sit and sigh?… Let us dance a tango till the dawn, warming our souls by the burning of straw."